Antibiotics - Dangerous or Safe?

In this modern era, antibiotics are most common and frequently used medications. Antibiotics are substances which kill or slow down the growth of microorganisms. Generally, antibiotics are made from other living organisms like bacteria, fungi etc. Often the question comes in mind that antibiotics are made from microorganism itself so does it safe or have some dangerous side effects. Here we will discuss it in details.

The first antibiotic, penicillin, was discovered accidentally from mould culture. And since today, there are hundreds of antibiotics available in the market that are of various ranges. Physicians are prescribing almost all of ranges for treating minor infections to life threatening diseases. And definitely it is safe to prescribe with fewer side effects and well accepted results in infections. There are few side effects like diarrhoea, stomach upset, vomiting, allergic reactions etc. But such side effects can be tolerated in some cases to treat life threatening infections.

Now a day, doctors are prescribing wide spectrum antibiotics which can effective in wide range of microbes. But antibiotics cannot cure viral or fungal infections in any way. So physicians have to be careful while prescribing antibiotics by recognizing infection type whether it is viral or fungal or bacterial infection.

But such blind use of antibiotic can produce resistant in bacteria and the infection becomes untreatable. Bacterial resistance is one of foremost concern in modern medicines. It can be developed by various means but most common among them are increasing use of antibiotics, improper prescriptions and poor hygienic practice. The antibiotic resistance leads to prolonging infection, increase in recovery time and hospital stay, therapy becomes more expensive and more toxic medication used to treat infection and causes higher mortality rate.

What we do to avoid bacterial resistance:
Avoid misuse of antibiotic.
Avoid self prescription
Do not use antibiotics in viral or other infections
Take antibiotics in doctors supervision
Complete the course of antibiotics even if you feel better.
Do not miss any dose
Do not save any drug for your next time treatment
Do not demand antibiotics from medical stores directly
And also do not take antibiotics which are prescribed for your relatives

In India, the cases of bacterial resistance are very common because diagnosis of causative agent is very rarely done by physicians. In normal practice they use to prescribe wide spectrum antibiotics without identifying microbial strains. Some of doctors are acting like doing some experiment on patient’s body. They are prescribing one medication and if it is not effective then after 2-3 days prescribing other one.

Sometime it works but sometime it put patients in a state from where recovery of their bodies is not possible and leads to higher cost medications and mortality.